Many times, temporary external storage is needed for a PC. The easiest way to get that storage is to attach a USB storage device to the PC. Some devices are self- contained – you plug them in and go.
Other devices require that your purchase a storage card and install it in a USB storage enclosure. Prices for the devices range from $5 to $150. USB thumb drives are cheap and physically small, but their disk I/O performance is not good, when compared with other alternatives.
I recently evaluated several different USB storage devices that support NVMe M2 storage cards.
Here are the results of that testing (using the Passmark Performance Test 9.0 app), along with performance comparisons of other devices:
| DiskMark | Description |
|---|---|
| 30667 | Western Digital Black SN770M NVMe 512 GB – internal to PC |
| 17333 | Samsung PM961 NMVe 256 GB – internal to PC |
| 5185 | Samsung 860 EVO SSD 500 GB – internal to PC |
| 4347 | Samsung PM961 NVMe 256 GB installed in Orico USB C enclosure – smallest of the three NVMe enclosures – has built-in heat sink – difficult to install NVMe board |
| 3999 | Samsung PM961 NVMe 256 GB installed in SSK USB C enclosure – has brass screw and nut to secure NVMe board to enclosure |
| 3964 | Samsung Extreme NVMe 1 TB – USB C enclosure – self- contained package – about $150 |
| 3622 | Samsung PM961 NMVe 256 GB installed in UGreen USB C enclosure |
| 860 | Seagate Momentus 2.5” 7200 RPM SATA 500 GB – internal to PC |
| 136 | SanDisk Ultra Flair 16 GB Thumb drive USB 3.0 |
The attached snapshot shows some of the test drives. From top to bottom:
- Orico NVMe enclosure
- Ugreen NVMe enclosure
- SSK NVMe enclosure
- SanDisk Extreme Gen 2 external storage
- Samsung 860 EVO SSD hard drive
- SanDisk Ultra Flair Type C USB thumb drive
